Frazer Hardy, Customer Success Manager at Percipient, explains why he’s proud to be part of the company’s story and talks through his views on what makes the team stand out in a crowded market.
Beyond Vanilla
When it comes to business software the level of innovation and maturity at play means that it can be tricky to stand out on core functionality alone. Sage Intacct bucks this trend, delivering cloud-native capabilities, depth of analysis and reporting, and easy-to-use dashboards, all of which converge to deliver greater strategic value for businesses and scale for innovation and expansion. Part of Sage Intacct’s uniqueness is that it evolves and delivers new updates constantly in line with customer feedback, to ensure relevance and robustness.
In a similar vein, partners and consultancies typically follow a traditional model based on the way things have always been done. This generally involves pushing software to their respective markets against a recurring revenue model.
Hearing Our Customers
At Percipient, we like to think that we share the ethos of Sage Intacct, channelling a modern, dynamic, two-way approach, continuously hearing what our customers have to say, and always challenging the status quo and improving our offering.
Our model centres around listening, learning about, and understanding what our customers need, before applying our knowledge and experience to be creative and propose solutions that we know will genuinely help them to get the most out of Sage Intacct.
In our early meetings, whether in person or on Teams, we encourage our prospects and customers to open up on the challenges they face, both daily and operationally, so that we can have a proactive, open, honest, and transparent conversation around how we can help. Building that trust and two-way dialogue from the outset is crucial.
The Best of Finance, Industry & Software
The team’s experience across finance, industry, and software, means that we intuitively know the right questions to ask. This combination is unique in the partner community. In my view, this is what truly sets us apart and ensures that our customers feel truly understood and supported throughout their decision-making process, deployment, and beyond.
This blend of expertise also ensures we speak the same language and helps us to understand the wider context. The wider context feeds everything. For example, if you are a hotel start-up with bold ambitions to scale globally, this knowledge of the bigger picture feeds the digital journey and must therefore be fully understood from the outset.
Our team establishes a relationship with our customers from day one and has a dedicated framework from which to formally check in, monitor progress against the goals discussed in the early stages of the project, and ensure niggles don’t fester and turn into problems.
Support in All the Right Places
We place a huge amount of value and resources in our support service, ensuring that our customers feel they have expertise at their disposal, whether it’s someone to reassure, steer, or a sporadic trouble shooter to call upon exactly at the point they need it.
We continuously look at new models and partners for third-party products to enhance or solve problems for customers and provide a dedicated support desk resourced with Sage Intacct consultants. Traditional partner models typically see a peak in customer interest in advance of the annual renewal period. However, in line with the “always-on” nature of Sage Intacct, so is our support and engagement with our customers. Testament to this ethos are the words of one of our newest customers, Aberdeen Performing Arts, as Matt Godfrey, Director of Finance and Commercial, explains:
Percipient’s in-depth knowledge and experience of both hospitality and the not-for-profit (NFP) sector meant that they really understood the dynamics, challenges, and financial management requirements of our organisation. The value they added from the outset was truly impressive. There was no hard sell, just a highly friendly, open, transparent, knowledgeable, and well-prepared team from day one. They had clearly taken time to learn about us and understood our business straight away, so we didn’t need to spend time at the start explaining what we did. Because of that joint understanding, we could scope the project incredibly robustly, instilling diligence and reducing any room for the project to be derailed at any point.
A very focused, robust methodology meant that we ensured the right amount of time was spent on the right areas and complexities. The Percipient team challenged some of our processes, which, because of their strong grounding in finance, was hugely valuable as they encouraged us to look beyond what we thought we needed to get to precisely what we needed. It was a genuine pleasure working with them and we got so much more than a software deployment – it was true consultancy of the highest level.
Percipient undoubtedly delivered more than we expected and in tandem with Sage Intacct, this project has been an enormous success. The wider team couldn’t believe how smooth it was, and the fact that it took a matter of weeks to go live was a bonus.
A Near-Perfect Model
Of course, we do not profess to be perfect all of the time, but our ethos, and brilliant team of people, ensure that we ALWAYS listen, ALWAYS understand and learn, and ALWAYS do our very best to tailor an approach that ensures our customers get the absolute most from their deployment.
And we do try to ensure that we have a few laughs along the way. This is very much a people business and it’s the relationships, alongside seeing our customers drive improvements in their businesses, which not only motivates us to continually improve the way we do things but makes it all the more rewarding when we see the results.
Get More from Sage Intacct with Percipient+
Follow the link to learn more about our Sage Intacct support service, Percipient+, or if you’d like to discuss how we can help you to get more from your Sage Intacct solution get in touch or call the team on 01606 871332.